Both Look Homeward, Angel and Tristram Shandy defy formal analysis. Both are concerned with the education of the very young. Both ...see that education as essentially the product of the impact of the world outside upon the young mind. Both describe that education through memories in maturity.... Both books are family novels, particularly rich in brilliantly rich, hyperbolically presented family portraits.... Both men were remarkably proficient at capturing the individual cadences of human speech and reproducing them with sharp accuracy, and both delighted in the rhetorically extravagant; so that their works present, not a unified style, but a medley of styles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic... literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who... will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There, burying each gloomy thought, each sad reflection in the hearse of dissipation, [we] lost the remembrance of our woes, our c...ruel misfortunes, our agonising sorrows--and graciously permitted them to glide along the stream of reviving comfort, blown by the gentle gale of new born hopes till they reposed in the bosom of oblivion--then--no! 'tis impossible! this style is too great, too sublime to be supported with proper dignity--the sublime and beautiful how charmingly blended!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unl...ike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see... what he describes--countrysides and figures, movements and gestures--how could he have a style, that is originality?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A beautiful sentence is beautiful, and a beautiful flower is beautiful, but their duration is nearly the same--a day, a century. N...othing dies more quickly than a style that is not supported by the solidity of strong thought. It shrivels up like a slackened hide; it falls in a heap like a rotten vine deprived of the tree it entwines. And if someone says that the vine keeps a tree with withered roots from falling down, I would agree. Style is also a force, but its value is that much more quickly diminished when it exhausts itself in preserving from annihilation the fragility which it embraces and sustains.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »